The Brooklyn Center of Long Island University is an urban institution that provides a quality, traditional education to primarily inner-city students. Sixty percent of the nearly 7,000 students are Black or Hispanic, 50% are from families with incomes below $7,500, and nearly all are first generation collegians. Most of the students reside in the surrounding communities of Fort Green, Bedford Stuyvesant and Brownsville. The Departments of Biology, Chemistry and Physician's Assistant propose the initiation of six research projects of potential biomedical significance. These include studies of aging, reproductive physiology, nucleic acid biochemistry, pathogenic bacteriology, fine structural alteration of leukocytes in septicemia and a potential test system for investigating aspects of membrane formation, viral behavior and drug effects in serotonin metabolism. We anticipate that the data gleaned from these studies will provide new information of biomedical importance; in addition, these research activities will also serve as a mechanism for introducing undergraduates to biomedical research. Each year, a minimum of 12 students will participate in the M.B.S. program. These participants will be given a formal, intensive orientation and will be introduced to research during their first summer as M.B.S. participants. This introduction will include sixty hours of lecture and at least one hundred and twenty hours of laboratory experience. Subsequently, the student participants will conduct, for two years, research projects in the above-listed areas. Upon the completion of their M.B.S. projects, the students will be awarded six academic credits and they will be granted a special certificate, a notation of which will appear on their official transcript.